A.I. Does Not Understand
Artificial Intelligence is a wonderful thing. It can correct your grammar, help you write a college essay, and develop videos using a famous person’s face and voice without ever consulting the famous person. Amazing. I am suitably impressed.
It knows a lot and it knows how to put it all together in easily digestible formats. What it can’t do, however, is understand.
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It doesn’t understand nuances, individual differences, regional perspectives, or personal preferences. And, it doesn’t understand me. I know this because my new watch is simultaneously both useful and annoying.
As I have said in the past, my lovely Google Pixel watch does everything I wanted it to do. It will alert emergency services if I fall and need help. It will even do that if I am in the shower. That is all I really wanted. Well, that and tell me what time it is.
The problem I am having is that it does so much more that it is becoming annoying. It came with Fitbit installed and at first I thought this would be a good thing for me. It would count my steps, tell me how long I have slept, tell me how long I have not slept, and record a whole host of other personal measures including skin temperature variation, mindful days, something called Daily Readiness, and (gasp!) menstrual health.
Along with all these measurements comes a thinly-veiled value judgement. You will be glad to know that my skin temperature is within personal range and my daily readiness is moderate, whatever that means.
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Public Domain Pictures It also assigns me a sleep profile with an associated animal. When I first began checking on my sleep it told me I was a Dolphin. Now, apparently, I am a hedgehog. My sleep has not noticeably changed, but I have gone from being a lively adorable sea creature to a small spikey mammal. This is not encouraging. At least I am not a rodent. Yet.
The system is also remarkably incapable of understanding how difficult it is to walk outside in snow, ice, wind, rain, or fog. All it knows is that some days I don’t walk. When I do go out to get some air it sends me a condescendingly approving text message which is the equivalent of, “Yay! You Walked!” Not enough to meet the optimistic standard I set for myself long ago, but I walked. Hooray.
It doesn’t know that it’s cold outside, my foot hurts, my hip bursitis is acting up, and I could really enjoy a nap. It only knows step counts. It doesn’t even know when those steps are uphill, are on sidewalks full of other people, or are trodden gingerly over tree roots in a forest. It only knows the count numbers.
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Traders Union My watch also comes with a gazillion other applications that I wish would just go away. The little identifying icons don’t tell me enough to know if I need them or not. I have used the little movie clapboard to turn the watch off when I was in the theatre, but most of the rest of the logos are a mystery to me. If I need the wallet I’ll use my phone or, dammit, my actual wallet.
Admittedly, I am probably the source of my own frustrations. I could tell my phone or Fitbit more about myself in the hopes that they might understand me better, but then I’d be putting more information about me out there into the A.I. universe, and nobody needs that.
No, A.I. does not understand me and that is because I haven’t told it much. I’m like that person who doesn’t communicate well and then complains when their partner can’t read their mind. Yep. That’s me. I’m a misunderstood introvert in a power-imbalanced emotional relationship with an extrovert technology.
#ai #counts #extrovert #fitbit #google #icons #introvert #judgement #pixel #steps #understanding #watch
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Richard Michael Blaber
